Allow an old hand to recollect the good old days for a bit.... It used to be AGS tradition that you couldn't start threads of no particular use or purpose in the general forum EXCEPT when the original post was the original poster's 1000th post. Of course that was in the days before the subtle art of useless threads was cheapened by the advent of a Rumpus Room specifically for useless threads.... Nevertheless, being long in the tooth and something of an old fart I hereby claim this traditional right.
I suppose some reminiscing is in order. Over the years I've come to think of the AGS forums as my internet home, a place where I can go knocking if I need to borrow a pixelated cup of sugar or find someone to e-mail food to my cat when I'm away for more than a couple of days. I don't always post frequently and am not often deeply involved in community issues, but know that I value this virtual neighbourhood deeply. I guess I'm less the muffin-baking community booster and more of the creepy guy who's always got his eye through the curtain, keeping tabs on when you come and go and what kind of stuff you leave out in your trash bin. But despite my introverted tendencies this place has always been friendly enough to lure me out of my shell. Thanks for that guys. There've been so many fond memories: MAGS comps, animation comps, writing comps, that time Ponch got bovine spongiform encephalopathy and was just spinning around on the floor for hours (good times....); the swarm project, that Mittens I attended, the community role-playing adventures, the avatar lovechild reunion.... and so many more. Many thanks to my generous collaborators, my incessant PM correspondents, and all the rest of the cheerful folk who make this place fun to hang out in.
Finally, in honour of this occasion, I've made you all a little something. A new smiley: (http://www.vanwijst.com/games/smileys/baron_cup.gif). It means something around the lines of villainous cackle -use it wisely!
Yeah, so.... Reply, won't ya? Otherwise my useless thread would seem extra useless and probably end up demoted to the (*gulp*) R-board :-\. Looking forward to the next thousand folks,
Baron
Cheers, that's a lot of posts, a lot of fond memories, a lot of cow-spinning and a really cool smiley. Now start the next swarm or I'll have to draw monocles on all your posts until you do so!
One would hope that you will be around to one day make a 2000th post...(http://www.vanwijst.com/games/smileys/baron_cup.gif)
Seriously, congrats on being an AGS old timer. I recall you PMing me with a few nice thoughts (talking about historical game ideas) after I posted in a newbie thread, which then caused me to play a few of your games.
Who on earth is this young upstart lording it about like an oldie?! :grin:
Let me take this opportunity to thank you for the Winter Rose, one of my favouritest AGS games ever.
/me clanks his bigbluecup with Baron's monocled receptacle
Quote from: kconan on Fri 19/04/2013 04:11:40
...caused me to play a few of your games.
kconan, I want you to know that I have begun to consider you as a son to me. Not a real son, obviously, but more of a twisted, cigar-smoking, bow-tied and bemonocled puppy dog spawn that I can count on to avenge me if I were to meet an untimely demise (http://www.vanwijst.com/games/smileys/baron_cup.gif). I remember being really enthusiastic about making a historical game at one point. Actually "Besieged" kind of grew out of that, until it evolved into the world's longest toilet joke (good times.... :=). I also started this (very incomplete) design doc for an adventure in the Roman Empire... but nothing ever came of it. Oh well, you can't build 'em all....
Quote from: Ghost on Fri 19/04/2013 03:21:22
Now start the next swarm or I'll have to draw monocles on all your posts until you do so!
I encourage you to draw monocles on all my posts! (http://www.vanwijst.com/games/smileys/baron_cup.gif)
As for swarming.... It was fun, it really was. But
man, it was time consuming! If someone reliable volunteers to assemble the assets and code the game, I'd throw my hat in for the position of Project Facilitator.
Quote from: Babar on Fri 19/04/2013 04:49:13
Let me take this opportunity to thank you for the Winter Rose, one of my favouritest AGS games ever.
Thanks! Speaking of time consuming -all those hand painted backgrounds in TWR (roll) -man! Where did I find all the time...? I'm glad it was enjoyed, but I could have made that game so much better knowing what I know now.
Quote/me clanks his bigbluecup with Baron's monocled receptacle
Hey...! Did you.... Did you just smash me in the face with your bigbluecup?!?
Hooray for Baron's 1000th post!
We should convince WHAM to create a new community game, that was really great.
Take care and it is really comforting to know that whatever we do or say, you'll be there: watching, nursing odd thoughts about our personas, silently making comments about our bad sense of humour, thinking that monocles should be trendy but at the same time being proud of being the only AGser with a monocle...
Yay for the creepy guy peering through the curtains! :-D
I don't want to admit when I hit my 1000th post (wrong) but congrats on yours (nod)
I seem to remember making a post with a picture of a horse or something...
YAY!
You made it! Congrats!
(http://www.smileyvault.com/albums/userpics/12962/er_lebe-hoch.gif)
... and I like the way this is going (http://www.vanwijst.com/games/smileys/baron_cup.gif)
I just realized that of all currently active members, only Gilbert, Mods and Joseph Di Perla were here when I joined.
Quote from: Andail on Fri 19/04/2013 18:52:16
I just realized that of all currently active members, only Gilbert, Mods and Joseph Di Perla were here when I joined.
Ditto, plus you.
Yeah, and I don't even have 800 posts yet. Although, if you were to tally up my old EZ Board posts, you might come up with over a thousand then.
I was half tempted to work out everyone's original EZBoard registration dates, then set the reg dates on these accounts. Unfortunately EZBoard has gone through so many changes since then that it's not really possible.
Okay, so I made this thing (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/milestones.php?user=39). Enter your own username to find out when you passed various post milestones!
Quote from: Darth Mandarb on Fri 19/04/2013 13:47:26
I don't want to admit when I hit my 1000th post...
Seems like I made my 1000th post...
six years ago?! 8-0
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/milestones.php with no ID will also work if you're too lazy to work out your own user ID, by the way.
It still only tells yours :P
Quote from: Babar on Fri 19/04/2013 22:29:07
It still only tells yours :P
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/milestones.php?user=1265 <--- these are yours, Babs. :)
Yes, I got that from filling in my own number (had to go to my profile, then find the number from the link for stats or posts). Almost 3000 in my case now!
Call me dumb, but this seems like a good time to ask. What does the 'most popular boards by activity' thing actually show? It doesn't add up to 100% and I barely ever go on the recruitment board. Is it something to do with when the board indexes were shuffled?
It's the number of posts per forum as a percentage of the overall total number of posts in that forum. So you can be ranked highly in Recruitment merely by posting a few times, as it's used so little. Hover over the pie chart image for each forum for a breakdown.
Nice milestone thingy! At this rate I'll get my thousand posts in 2021, when everyone will reminisce of the time they hit their tenth thousand posts.
Quote from: blueskirt on Sat 20/04/2013 00:56:02
Nice milestone thingy! At this rate I'll get my thousand posts in 2021, when everyone will reminisce of the time they hit their tenth thousand posts.
You will with THAT attitude!
As recently as 2010 I still had less than 400 posts (according to AGA's nifty milestone tracker), and an average post per day of something like 0.1. But then I made a conscious effort to buckle down and burn up some server space! Since then I've been doing about 250-300 per year: 0.7-0.8 per day, although my profile averages it out to only about 0.3 posts per day. Yes, I
do have a real sense of accomplishment now, and you can too if you follow my example. ;)
I can identify with the creepy guy peering through the curtain (http://www.vanwijst.com/games/smileys/baron_cup.gif)
Inspired by what Baron just said, I added a little posts per day thing. This may not strictly tie in with what the forums claim, because the forum counts all the posts you've ever made, while my script counts all the posts that still exist.
You may notice a random error message at the bottom of the page by the way. This is caused by the SMF forums integration script, but it won't cause any problems.
wow, I just noticed I've been registered for 392 days before I made my first post... *slowly scratches head*
@AGA: please link this from the forum navigation bar, under profile or so. Of course for the stats of logged in user, not for your stats ;)
Quote from: selmiak on Sat 20/04/2013 12:19:15
wow, I just noticed I've been registered for 392 days before I made my first post... *slowly scratches head*
Or you were annoying and we deleted all your earlier posts :tongue:
Quote from: selmiak on Sat 20/04/2013 12:19:15
@AGA: please link this from the forum navigation bar, under profile or so. Of course for the stats of logged in user, not for your stats ;)
I can set the whole thing up as a forums plugin, so it'll look a bit more... appropriate. I'll take a look at some point.
Can you add a function to show the percentage of good posts you've written?
Or a function that shows the percentage of the words Blade Runner?
Can I just say that bigbluecup.co.uk/yabb has been my homepage since 2005... We're closing to 10 years now!
And I still think of me as a kind of a newbie... brrr... I see the older generation transferred from other forums and feel jealous... :-/
I have moved on, but like so many here I consider this place to be my home. I think I will be suicidal if the AGS forums go away! :(
Congrats on your 1000th post baron! always respected you (in my 3500 posts... ;D)
Quote from: AGA on Sat 20/04/2013 12:31:56
Or you were annoying and we deleted all your earlier posts :tongue:
I didn't dare to post back then because I was afraid of all the flaming and bashing answers I would get, good thing these wild times are long gone and nowadays the admin orders the mods to keep an eye on all this bashing to stop it :=
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=milestones. This only shows your own stats though, so use the other one if you want to snoop on other people's stats.
Wow, i made my 1000th post over 9 Years ago, And I've made over 2000, But this is my 1st post in over 2 Years. I stopped making my last game 10 Years ago and it is was nearly completely finished, A remake of lsl 3. Still have it somewhere. Haven't been active here for ages but have a look occasionally. Nobody probably remembers me apart from a couple of people from fb
I remember you. You can tell you're old skool, you have an RPG Creator quote in your signature.
Yeah, I remember you AGA! just clicked on the link in my Sig, and that was a classic, did we ever find out who that was? I thought it maybe DG but it was prob just some random trying to be funny
Members possibly in the same range: nenomonkey, Osiris, Tom, Quickstrike, |Alky|, ZZjZmoz, WanderLady, Sola
None of them strikes me as the pranking sort though.
Ah, that was an immortal post. Thanks for linking back to it, it brings back memories!
AGA can you add a stat that calculates the amount of posts I regret making?
Quote from: Timosity on Sat 20/04/2013 16:05:15
Wow, i made my 1000th post over 9 Years ago, And I've made over 2000, But this is my 1st post in over 2 Years. I stopped making my last game 10 Years ago and it is was nearly completely finished, A remake of lsl 3. Still have it somewhere. Haven't been active here for ages but have a look occasionally. Nobody probably remembers me apart from a couple of people from fb
I actually do remember your nickname, but without an avatar I'm not too sure anymore. You had a green one, right?
Quote from: veryweirdguy on Sat 20/04/2013 18:46:40
AGA can you add a stat that calculates the amount of posts I regret making?
Well I can tell you how many of them we regret your making...
I remember that RPG thread! I was a registered lurker at that point. The original me died in the mass "zero post", inactive member clean-out that CJ did back in...'04? I think I was a Winter 2002 (or perhaps early '03) sign-up. I was here for Foz v Vel, I know that for certain.
I wasn't around for EZBoard, though. :(
Congrats on the milestone post, Baron. Here's to a 1000 more. And thanks for kicking off this nostalgia thread. It's bringing back memories of the early deys when I was but a lurker and not yet the prolifically posting cow that I've become. :smiley:
For those who want to know what the AGS community was like before moving to this place, here's a brief history:
A brief history of the AGS community before we moved to this place, for those who want to know
Pre-EzboardsNobody really knows what was going on here. It's a bit like the universe before the Big Bang. Basically it was CJ and Gilbert, talking about all the good games that could hypothetically be made with the AGS.
Early EzboardsCJ soon understood that people wanted to be able to talk about stuff outside game creation (don't look so shocked, younglings, this was before Facebook - people needed to hang out somewhere) so there was a general forum made, called gen-gen. In gen-gen, Eric wrote funny stuff, Helm wrote angry stuff, Naranjas wrote intelligent stuff and Dgmacphee wrote silly stuff. The rest just basically stood around and watched.
Every game that was released was praised to the skies even though they all sucked. If it had a character that could move, it was considered great. Virtually all games were just Roger and lots of blue cups, and this was considered wacky and parodical when it was in fact just lazy.
Yahtzee showed up and proved that AGS could be used to actually make playable games, and then he left again, for he had been insulted somehow.
2ma2 appeared and made a game that really
looked good, without any warning whatsoever, and he was considered awesome for a long time. Every time he promised to make a new game, it was all the community talked about for years. Then he stopped making games.
In the community at large there were hardly any rules, and in gen-gen there wasn't even a god, so gradually everyone started flaming each other and acted like trolls. Then Evenwolf appeared out of nowhere and calmed everyone the fuck down, and from then on there was order.
We implemented lots of new forums, like the critics lounge, and suddenly the community grew really big. Then we left Ezboards. The rest is history. No wait, that was the history, the rest is the present, kind of.
It's good to know this stuff. It's funny how we spend so much time in this virtual community.
I have nothing meaningful to say but I do miss having and knowing that CJ would show up often. Even when he begun to show up less it was reassuring in some way to know that he was around.
Ah, I miss Helm. He was the best in all the regularly appearing religion/philosophy flame wars. (Do we still have those?) Without Helm, I don't think there would have been a Linus or Resonance. He said something very nice to me after I made Anna in the OROW that encouraged me to make more games.
Congrats on the 1000'th post Baron! Looks like I hit 1000 five(!) years ago. I don't post very often any more (and when I do, it's always about Resonance, I know, I know) but I'm still on the forums pretty much every day. When I'm at work and need to browse the web for a bit to refresh my brain, for some reason my fingers automatically type a 'b' and press enter in Chrome's address bar and the auto-complete takes me to adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb. I'm glad that old link still redirects to the correct address. It's like a reflex.
Quote from: Andail on Mon 22/04/2013 07:59:06
For those who want to know what the AGS community was like before moving to this place, here's a brief history:
M0DS and I were around then too. I was making CJ a book of suggestions for him to implement. It was great. Also, there was Jereon Dekker (Or something like that) hanging around.
Apparently I reached 1000 posts. Who knew? But it doesn't show up on my milestones. It stops at 950 for some reason.
Jeroen Dekker was def (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?action=profile;u=42) and JD later by the way. Don't think he's around anymore though.
Like I said, it only counts the posts that still exist. So you may have 999 extant posts, but since that's between 950 and 1000 it won't show.
I like that summarized "In the beginning..." style summary of the Ezboard era. What about the early days of the AGS board?
Quote from: kconan on Tue 23/04/2013 03:04:44
I like that summarized "In the beginning..." style summary of the Ezboard era. What about the early days of the AGS board?
They're still available to read (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?board=1.7900)! Although the very earliest posts aren't, unfortunately.
Good going Baron! long time active members like you make this forum so useful and addictive. Although, I'm beginning to notice an inverse relationship between time reading the forum and actual work on my game.. does this affect you guys too?
PS that RPG Maker link just made my day :) I was going to make some dumb comment about hooking that dude up with Icey for a OSD remix, or some love-child speculation.. but that would be childish, especially from someone who has to finish his game and make 950 more post before I have a say.
Quote from: MiteWiseacreLives! on Wed 24/04/2013 06:03:48Although, I'm beginning to notice an inverse relationship between time reading the forum and actual work on my game.. does this affect you guys too?
I always find that I have more to add to many discussions on AGS when there is something more pressing I should be doing... like jobhunting now, or writing my dissertation this time last year. I guess that's how I've built up over 3000 posts :/
I think that time spent on this forums instead of actually making your game is a chronic behaviour of AGSers. It can be good and inspiring and even anti-stress, but it can also stop you from completing those hotspot descriptions you left behind in room3...
It sure took you some time to reach them posts.
Quote from: Nikolas on Sat 20/04/2013 19:44:21
I actually do remember your nickname, but without an avatar I'm not too sure anymore. You had a green one, right?
I remember you Nikolas, I can't even remember the last avatar i had, but i think it had green in it and was a character of myself.
One person I'm not sure has got mention is Spiros, I remember him being helpful back in the day